SAUBA ANTS. 
37 
1848.] 
have no poison-fangs, the Negroes declared it was very 
dangerous, and that its bite could not be cured. It is 
commonly known as the two-headed snake, from the tail 
being blunt and the head scarcely visible ; and they be- 
lieve that if it is cut in two, and the two parts thrown 
some yards apart, they will come together again, and 
join into an entire animal. 
Among the curious things we meet with in the woods 
are large heaps of earth and sand, sometimes by the road- 
side, and sometimes extending quite across the path, 
making the pedestrian ascend and descend, (a pleasing 
variety in this flat country,) and looking just as if some 
Para and Peru direct Railway Company” had com- 
menced operations. These mounds are often thirty or 
forty feet long, by ten or fifteen wide, and about three 
or four feet high ; but instead of being the work of a lot 
of railway labourers, we find it is all due to the industry 
of a native insect, the much-dreaded Saiiba ant. This 
insect is of a light-red colour, about the size of our 
largest English species, the wood-ant, but with much 
more powerful jaws. It does great injury to young 
trees, and will sometimes strip them of their leaves in 
a single night. We often see, hurrying across the path- 
ways, rows of small green leaves ; these are the Saiibas, 
each with a piece of leaf cut as smoothly as with scis- 
sors, and completely hiding the body from sight. The 
orange-tree is very subject to their attacks, and in our 
garden the young trees were each planted in the centre 
of a ring-shaped earthen vessel, which being filled with 
water completely surrounded the stem, preventing the 
ants from reaching it. Some places are so infested by 
